100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #16 Paramore – This Is Why

Released: 2022

The five year Paramore hiatus between 2017’s After Laughter and it’s successor This Is Why might have started out as a bulwark against creative wash out, but then along came a global pandemic to put musicians off the road and society into cages either real or imagined.

Not that Hayley Williams in particular lacked things to occupy her, releasing two solo albums during the gap with 2020’s Petals for Armor, then the following year’s stripped back FLOWERS for VASES / Descansos. If they didn’t exactly serve as appetite wetters – neither were supposed to – then the reclaimed band proper’s sixth release was to that point one of the decade’s most anticipated.

It’s lead single was brief, prickly and zoomed in on something perceptively counterintuitive about our new behaviors; despite the fact that we now could, nobody really wanted to go outside and stand next to strangers and all their mind bugs and non contagious, illogically strange idea infections. The music itself was as apparently conflicted, veering between gentle acoustics and a jerky, Talking Heads inspired chorus that looked inside itself. In between everything, Williams and co. had understood that once we’d locked ourselves up, we’d also thrown away the key.